UFC vet James Wilks retires after docs warn of 'significantly high risk of paralysis'

Already sidelined since October 2010 by injuries, the 34-year-old Wilks decided to call it quits after a dire warning from doctors, he today told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com).

More specifically, they told Wilks he’d have a “significantly high risk of paralysis” if he continued fighting, he said.

After healing from a bothersome knee, Wilks (7-4 MMA, 2-2 UFC) said an old neck injury began flaring up as he prepared for his MMA return. The injury has plagued him throughout his pro-fighting career, which began in 2003 after a move from England to the U.S.

About five years after Wilks quit playing rugby as a teenager, a doctor pointed to an X-ray of his neck. He didn’t know it at the time, but Wilks had fractured a vertebra about five years earlier.

“I must have been from rugby because I got asked when my neck got broken, and I said I’d never broken it, and then they showed me the X-ray,” Wilks told MMAjunkie.com.

Despite that knowledge, he decided to launch an MMA career. The highlight of it came with his “TUF 9″ championship in 2009, which began an eventual 2-2 run in the world’s top MMA promotion with victories over DaMarques Johnson and Peter Sobotta. But the neck problem never fully went away.

“I had problems in a couple of the fights that I didn’t really talk about,” he said. “In one of the fights, I got hit, and the whole left side of my body went numb, all the way down to the toes.”

He’s now dealing with severe spinal stenosis, which results in an acute narrowing of the spinal canal. It can be a debilitating condition for regular folks, let alone a top-level athlete in a combat sport.

“My bones are touching the spinal cord,” he said. “There should be a gap, so when you get hit, you’ve got some leeway for it not to cut into the vertebrae. But my vertebrae have grown from the front and back, and they’re touching the spinal cord.”

Making the decision to retire wasn’t an easy one, Wilks said. In fact, were it not for his family, he might’ve decided to throw caution to the wind and risked being paralyzed.

“I think if I was single and didn’t have a wife and a son to look after, I probably would have risked it,” he said. “But I thought about it for quite a while and made the decision (to retire).”

So Wilks now turns his attention to other pursuits. He’s working on a documentary with the likes of Mac Danzig and Jake Shields about nutrition and a plant-based diet (www.plantathlete.com). He’s also teaching with Mike “Joker” Guymon at Lightning MMA in Laguna Hills, Calif.

Admittedly, though, he hates that his final performance in the cage resulted in a UFC 120 loss to Claude Patrick. Wilks, who had recent bouts with Rory MacDonald and Amir Sadollah scratched due to injuries, hoped to leave the sport on a better note.

“It sucks because I don’t feel I’ve shown what really have in the octagon, and I didn’t want to go out on a loss,” he said.